Speculations done correctly can have a good chance to arrive at truth. That's also known as reasoning. There's probably no experimental confirming or disconfirming this, ever, but that doesn't mean all theories stand on equal ground.

After almost a century of discussions between smart people, the physics consensus has steadily inched away from Copenhagen.

That said, that doesn't mean lazy evaluation isn't happening. You just can't use lazy evaluation to "explain" wavefunction collapse, it's more the other way around, that collapse can be a lazy evaluation trick. It'd describe only this simulation and say nothing about outer reality (thus no longer works as evidence for or against the simulation hypothesis, it's just a consistent part of the story given that it's true).